Press Release

During April and May the George Adams Gallery will show recent drawings by Valerie Demianchuk. The exhibition consists of 12 graphite pencil drawings of found objects all rendered in life-scale in exquisite, painstaking detail. This is Demianchuk's first one-person exhibition.

Demianchuk works exclusively in graphite pencil and typically draws natural forms found on trips to New England such as spanish moss, a bird's wing and a root ball. Other works in the exhibition, however, include a circuit board titled Self that she made for the gallery's recent Self-portrait show, and a minutely detailed rendering of rubble she made for the gallery's World Trade Center benefit held last October.

All the images are depicted life-size and in black and white, with each drawing taking from three to six weeks to complete. The earliest works in the show are made on 22x30 sheets paper, but she has recently shifted to 40x30 sheets which allows the image to float free of the paper edge.

Valerie Demianchuk was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1972. She graduated from the Schevchenko Art School, Kiev in 1991 before coming to the United States. She also studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and received her BFA from the Pratt Institute in 1998. Although this is her first one-person exhibition, Demianchuk has been included in group shows at the Arnot Museum in Rochester and the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock, with both institutions acquiring works for their collections. Valerie Demianchuk currently lives and works in New York City.